If civil service reform is to succeed, the agenda cannot be dictated by a savings target
4 min read
The Spring Statement confirmed what has been obvious for some time: the government faces a very difficult fiscal situation.
What headroom existed has evaporated, inflation remains stubbornly high, and growth looks sluggish at best. On top of that, international security necessitates a significant increase in defence spending, leaving even less for other departments.
It is no surprise that government efficiency has returned to the top of the agenda, and with that has come the target for the Civil Service to cut its administration budget by 15 per cent by 2030. There is nothing wrong in principle with attempting to reform the Civil Service, but I do have some deep concerns about this target and its consequences.
The entire Treasury is ‘administration’, as are almost all policy experts and government scientists
Prospect has a long history of engaging positively with employers embarking on change programmes. One universal fact I have seen in all my years negotiating is that if you start with the sole goal of saving a specific amount of money in the short term, you are doomed to fail in the middle to long term. You may succeed in notionally reducing that cost for your annual report but invariably there are unforeseen consequences that reduce your future capability. ‘Savings’ in one area may result in increased spending elsewhere.
In the push to quickly cut costs, which usually means cutting staff, you have very little control over the skills you lose. That means losing essential institutional knowledge, which is very hard to replace. And the line that these savings all come from ‘administration’ is misleading. In Civil Service terms, ‘administration’ simply means everything that isn’t direct programme spending. That means the entire Treasury is ‘administration’, as are almost all policy experts and government scientists. If the government does recruit thousands more digital and data specialists – and I hope it does – then the pay for these staff will also be from ‘administration’ budgets. We need much more clarity here on where these savings are going to come from, and which functions are going to be scaled back.
We should also be wary of the distinction being drawn between ‘back room’ and ‘frontline’ public servants. We need a functioning bureaucracy to run the machine of government. Many of the worst policy mistakes and most costly decisions made in recent years have been caused by too little Civil Service expertise at the centre – not too much.
Prospect and our members welcome reform. The Prime Minister was right when he said that too often the experience of the Civil Service is of “good people, trapped in a bad system”. We are also optimistic about the potential for technology to improve the operation of government and the working lives of our members. But this requires investment in people and systems. The new transformation fund will hopefully play a role in facilitating this, as well as rectifying some of the IT failures recently identified by the Public Accounts Committee.
Fundamentally, a Civil Service with more specialist skills will have to be a better-paid Civil Service. The danger is that the entire reform agenda ends up driven by the savings target, rather than by wider objectives about how to achieve a more effective Civil Service.
It doesn’t help that the way this agenda has been communicated has left a lot to be desired. Announcements have been sprung on civil servants, who often end up reading about changes to their jobs in the news before even senior staff have been officially briefed. And while there has been some constructive language from the Prime Minister and others, this has been punctuated by aggressive press briefings that seem almost designed to demoralise and anger staff.
We stand ready to work with the government and the next steps of this plan, but if they want to bring civil servants and their unions with them on this agenda, then this approach must end. Government needs to spend more time talking to civil servants, and less time talking about them in the press.
Mike Clancy is general secretary of Prospect union
